Civics of Technology Recommendations
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Book Club This Week! On March 13th, Jacob Pleasants and Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Nicholas Carr’s new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Register on our events page.
Next Book Club: On April 10th, Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Building the Innovation School, written by our very own CoT Board Member Phil Nichols.
The Latest Book Reviews:
The Extinction of Experience (Rosen, September 2024)
AI Snake Oil (Narayanan & Kapoor, September 2024)
The Skill Code (Beane, June 2024)
Learning in a Time of Abundance (Cormier, 2024)
The Sirens’ Call (Hayes, 2025)
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By Charles Logan & The CoT Board
Who needs a black-boxed algorithm to recommend where to shift your attention to next when you have the Civics of Technology board? For this week’s blog, I (Charles) asked members of the Civics of Technology board to offer something that they’ve enjoyed recently. We invite you to share your own recommendations in the comments section!
Allie
I recommend If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins. Published in 2023, this book provides a detailed recent history, often based on Bevins' on-the-ground experiences as an international journalist, of the global mass protests of the 2010's. Although not specifically focused on the role of digital media in these protests, his analysis shows the combination of social, political, ideological, and technological factors that both gave rise to the mass protests, while also precluding the revolutions the protests sought. Since reading this book, I have often returned to Bevins' history to think about the promises and pitfalls of digitally mediated activism.
Autumm
This isn't something new, but it is something that I was recently reminded of: the work of Nicky Case (she/her or they/them). I was reminded of this when I needed to discuss network effects with my Digital Culture and Learning Class at the University of Minnesota and I remembered Nicky's interactive game, "The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds.” It is a narrative-based game that shows how connections work and how information spreads. Besides “The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds,” I highly recommend Nicky's other works, especially the one about trust and the newest about AI.
Charles
Because I’ve been learning more about AI’s environmental harms, I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersections of critical technology education and climate justice education. As I’m exploring how the two fields might build with each other, I’ve returned to a program that I first discovered when I began my doctoral studies. Learning in Places is “a collaborative network of educators, families, and community partners working to cultivate equitable, culturally thriving, socio-ecological systems learning and ethical decision-making using field-based science education in outdoor places.” The collaborative has created an extensive curriculum for educators and families (sound familiar?!?). While I don’t identify as a science educator, I am a father of three young children. One of my family’s favorite activities is the wondering walk and posing “Should we” questions. For instance, “Should we remove or add more bird feeders to our neighborhood?” I appreciate how, through these wondering walks, my kids and I engage in ethical sensemaking about humans’ relationships with each other and our relationships with other animals, lands, and waters. As somebody interested in asking “Should we” questions about technology and education, I find the Learning in Places model an inspiration–and I hope you do too!
Dan
Recommendation #1: I really love how the Civics of Technology book clubs motivate me to keep learning. The most recent book club was on The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy by Francesca Bolla Tripodi and was led by Allie Thrall on Tuesday, February 17th, 2025. Unfortunately, I missed the discussion, but I read the book and have been chatting informally with Civics of Tech members about it. The book really challenges a lot of conventional aspects of media literacy by showing how conservative media practices include practices such as "doing your own" in ways that are similar to scriptural inference that include lateral reading and other strategies. However, these media practices still rely on terminology such as "crisis actor" or "black on white crime" that travel grassroots up through the far-right/conservative media ecosystem and affect what people find online. The book challenges educators to rethink what effective media literacy looks like in this new media ecosystem.
Recommendation #2: The Civics of Technology blog posts every week challenge my thinking! I really appreciate posts from our community, from the Civics of Tech parents series to Autumm Caines' posts on AI practices to Jamie Manolev's recent Class Dojo post. I learn so much every week.
Erin
Silver Lining for Learning is “is an ongoing conversation on the future of learning with educators, education leaders, innovators, and learners from across the globe.” The moderators have varying ideas and approaches to tech in education, yet each has extensive experience that they use to contextualize current trends and mitigate hype.
Jacob
Recommendation #1: Let's go with Jathan Sadowski's latest book: The Mechanic and the Luddite. This book just has so much of a Civics of Technology vibe. It's not just a critique of specific technologies, but really a whole approach to critiquing technological capitalism. There are great examples throughout, but also some clear and cogent theoretical contributions. Sadowski's writing is also just a lot of fun. He holds nothing back.
(Charles’ editorial: you can listen to Sadowski visit two of my favorite podcasts: Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us and Mél Hogan’s The Data Fix.)
(Jacob’s addendum: you can also get a whole lot more Sadowski by tuning into the podcast This Machine Kills, which he does alongside Edward Ongweso Jr.)
Recommendation #2: Okay, you get another book, but something totally different: Hum, a novel by Helen Phillips. It's a really interesting work of speculative fiction, but there's an element of the world that has really stuck with me. There are humanoid artificial intelligence bots in the novel that the humans have to interact with on a regular basis (they seem to have taken up all the "service" roles in society). The kicker is that about every 5 minutes, they advertise to you... aggressively. It's brutal, and the only way to get them to stop is to pay an exorbitant fee for "ad free mode." Freaking brilliant.
Phil
Recommendation #1: Mon Oncle (1958, dir. Jacques Tati) — Each of Tati's films offers a sharp yet playful critique of modernity and automation, but 'Mon Oncle' is his most pronounced examination of the alienation caused by technological change and the pursuit of 'progress.' The pairing of physical comedy with meticulous visual storytelling brilliantly contrasts the charm of human-scale sociality with the absurdity of automated living. (Tati's subsequent film, 'Playtime,' depicts a fuller maturation of these themes, but Mon Oncle is worth watching first for anyone new to his work.)
Recommendation #2: Temporary (2020, Hilary Leichter) — Temporary is a surreal and darkly humorous exploration of the erosion of stable employment in late capitalism. The novel's structure replicates the precarity of its gig-working protagonist by abruptly transporting her to new, and increasingly absurd, settings and jobs — allowing readers to experience the 'temporariness' of her employment both in the content and form of the book. It's also very, very funny.
Sharla
I am recommending the documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon. The documentary-style film follows two young Black DIY detectives as they search for Renée L'Espérance, the model who portrayed Mavis Beacon in the 1980s computer game Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The doc is a fun watch, and it asks us to consider our relationship to avatars and other real and imagined figures that we might connect with through memes, games, and social media. The film can spur questions about digital ethics as well, such as how to approach someone you only know through a parasocial relationship. Overall, it is a fun, thought-provoking watch. I wrote a Civics of Technology blog post about it too.